YARN
Fleet Captain
Where do we go from here?
This is perhaps the nagging question that hounds our thoughts.
Prequels, sequels, side-verses, reboots, reimaginings, there is an ever proliferating list of narrative terms which accompany our sense of anxiety about how to answer this question.
The culprit, or so it would seem, is CANON. A chief complaint we've heard about Trek is the constricting nature of canon. You can only tell so many stories before you wind up painting yourself into a corner. Still, you want to abide by what has been established to some extent to give a feeling of continuity.
So where do we go?
I offer the following solution - Trek should be written as a canonical cycle and not canon.
OK, what the hell does that mean?
Canon is a mandate to respect facts as they are while moving forward and telling new stories. A canonical cycle operates withing the mode of re-telling, not respecting every little fact, but respecting the broad strokes.
It means, that Trek should be approached as a completed narrative. It begins with Enterprise and ends around the time of TNG.
The tales writers tell should occur within the cyle of that narrative. Certain facts should be treated as fixed; it is a fixed fact that Archer, Kirk, and Picard, for example, were captains of starfleet ships named Enterprise. Writers offer variations on the theme within your given telling of the cycle, but you retell the great stories with the great characters - only altering minor details.
This is like the idea of the reboot, except the canonical cycle is not just concerned with re-setting the initial conditions, but also has the end conditions in mind, the whole narrative arc.
Those who redo Trek are called upon to redo the cycle of stories in their own way. There have been wildly divergent stage productions of MacBeth, for example, but all have worked from the same text.
A new series (film or TV) would pick up the challenge to tell the cycle in its own way, perhaps beginning at the beginning, perhaps not. The challenge would be, not to do something really new, but to retell the best stories in imaginative ways and to tell new stories (when new sci-fi ideas appear - a rare occasion indeed) or offer the allegorical twist (given current events) within the existing frame of characters and timelines we already have (like a TNG episode we missed or a timely twist of an old episode).
It is in this way that the narrative could be reinvigorated, while it would still feel like a homecoming.
This is perhaps the nagging question that hounds our thoughts.
Prequels, sequels, side-verses, reboots, reimaginings, there is an ever proliferating list of narrative terms which accompany our sense of anxiety about how to answer this question.
The culprit, or so it would seem, is CANON. A chief complaint we've heard about Trek is the constricting nature of canon. You can only tell so many stories before you wind up painting yourself into a corner. Still, you want to abide by what has been established to some extent to give a feeling of continuity.
So where do we go?
I offer the following solution - Trek should be written as a canonical cycle and not canon.
OK, what the hell does that mean?
Canon is a mandate to respect facts as they are while moving forward and telling new stories. A canonical cycle operates withing the mode of re-telling, not respecting every little fact, but respecting the broad strokes.
It means, that Trek should be approached as a completed narrative. It begins with Enterprise and ends around the time of TNG.
The tales writers tell should occur within the cyle of that narrative. Certain facts should be treated as fixed; it is a fixed fact that Archer, Kirk, and Picard, for example, were captains of starfleet ships named Enterprise. Writers offer variations on the theme within your given telling of the cycle, but you retell the great stories with the great characters - only altering minor details.
This is like the idea of the reboot, except the canonical cycle is not just concerned with re-setting the initial conditions, but also has the end conditions in mind, the whole narrative arc.
Those who redo Trek are called upon to redo the cycle of stories in their own way. There have been wildly divergent stage productions of MacBeth, for example, but all have worked from the same text.
A new series (film or TV) would pick up the challenge to tell the cycle in its own way, perhaps beginning at the beginning, perhaps not. The challenge would be, not to do something really new, but to retell the best stories in imaginative ways and to tell new stories (when new sci-fi ideas appear - a rare occasion indeed) or offer the allegorical twist (given current events) within the existing frame of characters and timelines we already have (like a TNG episode we missed or a timely twist of an old episode).
It is in this way that the narrative could be reinvigorated, while it would still feel like a homecoming.
